Seattle Schools Community Forum

You may recall I, along with other Dems, were not so happy to see what appeared to be a stripped-down public education plank in the Washington State Democrats platform. I heard from one of the members of the Platform Committee members, Andrew Villeneuve, on this topic recently. I wanted to let you know that this past weekend, the Washington State Democratic 2014 Convention was held in Spokane. The final Education language adopted by the Convention is here: http://www.wa-democrats.org/issues/education As you can see, it's quite substantive. The Platform Committee agreed that the original draft (which was produced by a subcommittee) was insufficient and worked hard to ensure we had a set of Education planks that we could be proud of. I wasn't present when the subcommittee responsible for Education came up with the original draft, so I can't speak to how we ended up with that language, but several of us were resolved that we needed to go back to the drawing board and write...

Stories on Common Core polling, charter schools, all-day schools, spending on high poverty schools and and an ACLU lawsuit over uneven school experiences for low-income students.

March and Rally to Gates Foundation To note: there is the march and rally to protest the ed reform work of the Gates Foundation today, starting at 5 pm at Westlake Park.  The march will then go to the Gates Foundation on Mercer at 5th.  There will be speeches and some kind of flash mob dance. The police are warning of possible traffic issues.   From Diane Ravitch: Speakers: Anthony Cody (prolific education leader from CA) & Kshama Sawant (speaking as a teacher & city council member) will engage the crowd by connecting public education issues to larger issues of democracy vs. oligarchy. Morna McDermott & other education heroes will also make the case for school transformation, not corporate reformation. (Editor's note: Cody is a former teacher and writer at Education Week.) Anthony Cody will be speaking at 10:30 on Friday June 27th at the University of Washington HUB Room 332. His talk about the education ‘reform’ movement and how to recla...

Update : from the Washington Post's The Answer Shee t on this story: How well special education students perform on a test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, will be one of the factors considered. This marks the first time that NAEP scores have been attached to any education policy that has potential consequences; the Education Department could withhold federal funds to states that don’t comply with the new special education regulations, though officials there said that is not something they want to do. But NAEP, a test given every two years to a nationally representative sampling of students,  wasn’t designed for this purpose . When asked by reporters about whether using NAEP for this purpose was turning it into a high-stakes test, Duncan said, “I wouldn’t call it high stakes.” He said his department was using NAEP because, however “imperfect,” it was the “only accurate measurement we have.” Well, shades of MAP, imagine using a test for a purpose ...

 Update: here's a link to ACLU Washington's page on youth issues. This ruling may be a subject you might want to talk to your kids - especially teens - about at some point. In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court today ruled that police must have a warrant to search the cellphones of people they arrest.  From the NY Times: The old rules, Chief Justice Roberts said, cannot be applied to “modern cellphones, which are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” The courts have long allowed warrantless searches in connection with arrests, saying they are justified by the need to protect police officers and to prevent the destruction of evidence. From Chief Justice Roberts ruling:

Tomorrow is the public hearing on the budget.  This is a state-mandated requirement.  There are rules about it. But I noticed that the SPS website - the home page, the Board's home page, the Calendar page - none of them explained how to give input (other than showing up and THEN finding out).  No info on length of time at the hearing, no info on giving written comment - either e-mail or snail mail - or how long that written comment will be accepted. I complained to the Board and now there's this at the district website.  Again, no real info.  The link to the "rules?"  As of this writing, it doesn't work. Again, what does it take?  Is this that staff doesn't know how?  Doesn't care? I'm filing a complaint with the state.

I just saw this article in Slate about drowning and what it really looks like.  It's not someone bouncing up and down, yelling, "Help!"  Important reading for parents as we go into the summer months.